Coraline

I slipped off to catch this movie at the 2nd run theater. I've been wanting to see it for a long time, keep hearing how wonderful it is and that it's a Must See and all, so I finally got to check it out.

Brace yourself, I may be one of the only people in the population who really disliked this movie! :P Where to start?

The gimmick here is Stop Motion Animation, like the Claymation Raisins we used to love to watch. Only this is not like that. No clay, and I kept wondering why did they bother with Stop Motion Animation? It would have had the same impact for me if it was a cartoon or any other faster, less laborious media. I think this story desperately needed the gimmick.

The entire thing is dark and creepy. If you adore Tim Burton (I do not) then you'll eat this up with a spoon. I hated it from the beginning and continued hoping it would get better, but it didn't.

Basically I don't like fantasy - meaning anything where pink elephants can fall out of the sky for no reason whatsoever and anything at all can just flash in front of your eyes. I think people who like that kind of thing also like to sit and stare at shiny objects. Anything that moves and flashes is enough for them. I like things to make sense and to have a reason - possibly even a plot. This movie DID have a story. It's a fantasy fable of a girl who gets whisked away to another world and her lesson is to realize things aren't so bad in her real life and "There's no Place Like Home" - ala Wizard of Oz. But with ugly, creepy trees, scary and weird scenes, garish and even sexually explicit neighbors with giant breasts.... I just couldn't figure out who this movie was catering to. It's absolutely not for children. Not for men or boys. Possibly the female 30 to 40 range? And would they willingly flock to a cartoon movie?

Because the film seems geared to an older crowd, the story is utterly simplistic and boring - you see the ending coming from the starting line and it seems so very far away. It never falters, never twists, just plods along until you get exactly through the checkpoints that you expected to find. Since the story is so elementary, it doesn't match up with the demographic. Seems geared to telling a tale to small children but not with those visuals.

The ugliness and odd, random fantasy stuff thrown in is distracting. Coraline never does come across as the clever, smart, quick or funny girl that I hoped for the entire time. I can't figure out why she has blue hair. I can't figure out why she feels so let down that her mother doesn't cook but her father does. She sounds like she was cut out of the 50s and her parents are modern day people.

She's downright rude to the only other kid in the movie - Wybie (she says "Wybie born?"). She puts him down openly and then asks for the "other mother" (a witchy, Cruella DeVille knock off) to sew up his mouth and silence him and when that happens she's happy about it. That cruelty isn't really addressed. Wybie walks about with a neck that dangles worse than George Clooney's, as if he were a bobble head with a sprung neck. He hangs his head in every scene, obviously less than, obviously bowing to the mean Coraline character, shy, but always helpful and attentive to her. It sure doesn't help that he's black, or at least mixed. His grandmother appears at the end and she's clearly black. Wybie's kinky hair indicates his race, and when you reflect on the boldly negative treatment of him throughout..... it feels a bit like the movie is more Gone with the Wind era than now. It was clearly insulting.

The strange neighbors living in the other apts also seem very old time - very old fashioned and reminded me of books I read as a small child that were written in the 50s.

It seems to me this was a very old story and a very old idea that was slapped with a weak attempt at updating ("Let's make the parents type on computers") and the Stop Motion gimmick and called good to go.

I didn't like it.

This one gets a '1'